


you and your memory

by noahfronsenburg



Category: Tales of Symphonia
Genre: Bittersweet Ending, Canon Compliant, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Holidays, Talesmas 2k18, no betas we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-09-24 12:45:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17100836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noahfronsenburg/pseuds/noahfronsenburg
Summary: “I don’t know if you can eat it, but Happy Solstice.”





	you and your memory

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ssc-chico](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=ssc-chico).



> happy holidays, ssc-chico! i went with the prompt for yuan/martel and gift exchange. this....is probably not what you were expecting! but here we are. i hope that you enjoy this and that you had a great holiday season so far; best wishes to you for the holidays :D!
> 
> title from [you or your memory](https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/mountaingoats/youoryourmemory.html) by the mountain goats

The first Midwinter after Martel dies is not in any way celebratory. The whole world outside of Yuan’s family, maybe, but not them. They’re all locked away inside themselves, their emotions dormant, their thoughts jumbled, their fears pressing. None of them are quite _real_ , quite _themselves_ —instead, they are ghosts, inhabiting bodies still and circling through life like one of these days, they will be able to wake up and live again.

 

But they don’t.

Yuan doesn’t remember when he bought Martel’s gift; it was sometime when she was alive and before she was dead, in what to him is now another lifetime. When he’s trying to fake cleaning for solstice he finds it cast aside, tossed into a pile of other stuff, lost, forgotten, in the grief afterward.

So he dusts it off, and takes it over to her empty grave, and sets it down on top of it, and crouches by her headstone, and doesn’t say anything. He just stares off into space and feels….empty, like someone has scooped him out, and he doesn’t really remember what happiness is, but he does remember that Martel would have loved her gift, preserved flowers pressed in lacquer, folded into a bracelet, dewdrops and lilies of the valley curling up around her wrist, sparkling frost on the tips of rosehips.

When he can’t stand being there any more, he leaves, and tries to forget about it.

 

 

 

But he can’t.

He finds a journal, one that has a cover that is paper made from rosepetals and wool, a thick, heavy leather outside around vellum interior. Even though it costs way more than he would usually spend, he gets it as a reflex, an impulse, and puts it on his mantle and there it sits for months until the solstice rolls around again, and he takes it down and takes it out to the grave and sets it against the headstone and sits and thinks.

Thinks for real, this time. Doesn’t say anything, but ponders. There’s no heartfelt message he feels he has to pour out; no dearly beloved letter to leave for her.

He goes away, and feels a little bit lighter.

 

 

He doesn’t always find the perfect gift. Sometimes the gift is just a bunch of flowers. There are a few years when he all but crawls there, bleeding, barely alive, holding on because his body is tied to his crystal is tied to _her_ crystal. Over time, the world changes and her grave is swallowed by other graves, people burying on top of the dead. Sometimes, it’s a forest. Sometimes, it’s a pond. Sometimes, it’s a house.

But it’s always the same spot they buried her. Thousands of years don’t change that. Her body not even being there doesn’t change that, but Yuan isn’t going to go up to Welgaia and feel his skin crawl down his back every time another empty-eyed hollow ghost glides past, murmuring deference to something he doesn’t believe in. He won’t stand shoulder to shoulder with Mithos and listen to him murmur sweet nothings about his beloved sister, dead and gone. He won’t look too closely at the corpse that used to be Kratos, long, long ago, before he just turned off and went away and never came back. Yuan isn’t going to go sit with her cold dead body, preserved and floating and just waiting for the lights to turn on, and pretend that it feels like her.

It doesn’t feel like her.

Steel and space isn’t her. Metal and coldness isn’t her. Concrete and light isn’t her.

Martel is the earth, is her headstone, is the rustle of the trees, is the loam and the dirt and the decay. Martel is the life that blooms from corpses and the fungi that grow beneath the canopy and the sunlight and the wind and the water. She’s the smell of fresh and old flowers, she’s the taste of fresh fruit, the sight of rotten apples. Martel is gone inside, her spirit and body trapped, but her _essence_ is the world, flowing inch by inch out of the Kharlan Tree, whenever it’s let to fill the soil.

Mithos can’t see past the end of his nose, the body and spirit rotting away slowly into petrification, when Martel is everywhere, all around, in every breath Yuan takes when he walks the planets below. If Mithos ever left Welgaia, he’d know in a second, in a heartbeat, the moment he curled his toes in the sand beside Triet or tasted the fresh snowflakes near Flanoir.

One day, Kratos comes back and he looks like Yuan had once upon a time. Like someone had taped him up together again, glued him into a whole from pieces, scooped him inside-out and left him to dry out and rot in the sand. It isn’t a corpse that follows Mithos.

It’s a ghost.

So Yuan takes Kratos with him, and they go to a bazaar, and when Kratos starts shaking when he sees a jaunty beret with a flower knit to its brim, Yuan buys it along with his small cactus in a pot, and they go together to the empty field that had once been a house, a town, a graveyard, a forest, a pond, a gravestone, and they put their gifts down and sit in silence, and say nothing.

Maybe Kratos cries. Maybe he doesn’t.

They let the silence drink it all, bare toes curled into the grass that blooms into the scent of her hair, listen to the wind between the boughs of the copse nearby that sounds like her laugh, watch the sun that beams down and feels like her smile, deep in their bones.

 

 

At Solstice, Yuan brings a hard cheese he was given by one of his former Renegades from her first year on her dairy farm and takes it to the Kharlan Tree. He waits until Martel, whose footsteps still remind him of Tabatha, whose voice sounds like Spiritua, whose eyes gleam like Mithos, climbs down to meet him.

He hands her the cheese. “I don’t know if you can eat it,” he tells her, as she turns it back and forth, “But Happy Solstice.” When she lifts her hands in the air to inspect it, wrapped up in a checkered cheesecloth, her sleeve slips back to reveal a bracelet around her wrist, preserved flowers pressed in lacquer, dewdrops and lilies of the valley curling up around her wrist, sparkling frost on the tips of rosehips.

Martel hands him a deck of cards, each cut from a paper-thin strip of white bark almost as hard as steel, from a tree that’s been dead for four thousand years. The cards are all embossed in a language Yuan’s tired eyes have to work to read, that he’s not heard spoken longer than any building has ever stood.

“Sorry,” Martel tells him, in Spiritua’s voice, with Anna’s laugh, with the self-reproving hum of Botta, “That it took so long.”

He takes her hand in his, and kisses the hollow of her wrist, just beneath the bend of the metal, on the hand that wears his ring on the third finger, and, for the first time, on the ground that once held an empty grave beneath a stone and now holds a growing seedling—

Prays.

**Author's Note:**

> social media et al @jonphaedrus


End file.
